Exposing pro-Israel bias, propaganda, disinformation and spin in Australia's mainstream media. Monitoring pro-Israel influence in Australia's public and political arena.

Wednesday, July 16, 2014

Slaughtering Them in Gaza, Smearing Them in Sydney

"The country's most acclaimed writer, Amos Oz, tried to sound the alarm before Mohamed's murder. He said even the term price-tag was 'a sweet name for a monster that needs to be called what it is: Hebrew neo-Nazi groups.' 'Our neo-Nazi groups enjoy the support of numerous nationalist or even racist legislators, as well as rabbis who give them what is in my view pseudo-religious justification,' he wrote." (Savagery up-ends Israelis' conviction, John Lyons, The Australian, 12/7/14)

Oz's comments about Israel's burgeoning neo-Nazi movement sprang to mind while I was reading a description of last Sunday's protest in Sydney against Israel's latest round of massacres in Gaza. Masquerading as reportage, it was one of those pieces that typically reveal more about the author than the subject under scrutiny. It may best summed up as a hatchet job - a Zionist hatchet job.

The author, Julie Nathan, is described in a footnote as "the research officer for the Executive Council of Australian Jewry" (ECAJ), leading one to reflect yet again that there is research, and (if I may put it this way to describe the Zionist variety) reZearch.

The title, Antisemitism flying high at Sydney rally, references the many flags flown at the rally. Despite the fact that they were, as you'd expect, overwhelmingly Palestinian, all Nathan can see is "dozens of the black jihadist Shehada flags and Hezbollah flags." (jwire.com.au, 14/7/14)

In fact, there were at most 3 to 4 black flags in a crowd of thousands, and only the odd Hezbollah flag, generally worn as a cape. The explanation for Nathan's myopia here, of course, lies squarely with her Zionism. After all, didn't the early Zionists famously 'see' Palestine as a land without a people for a people without a land?

"Antisemitism," she writes, "was also flying high. It was open, unashamed and palpable. The images through posters and flags were not just anti-Israel, but antisemitic to its core."

To the extent that one is a Zionist, of course, no such gathering can ever be "just anti-Israel." In the deluded Zionist mind, anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism go hand in hand, and with Israel now being spun as the collective Jew (seriously!), speaking ill of Israel, even as it 'mows the grass' in Gaza, cannot but be anti-Semitic to Israel-firsters such as Nathan.

Now I won't bore you here with commentary on the full range of alleged anti-Semitic nasties descried by her. Since she takes particular exception to the following poster, let it suffice:

"A particularly odious poster was of a Star of David with a swastika embedded within it and the words Holy Cost' playing on the word 'Holocaust'. The implication was a mocking of the Holocaust against the Jews, while accusing the Jews of committing a holocaust against the Palestinians." (Note that when it comes to those children of a lesser God, the Palestinians, they get a lower case 'h'.)

For Zionist zealots like Nathan, there is only one possible interpretation: the individual who created this particular poster was simply an anti-Semite, nothing more, nothing less, no context needed.

The problem for Nathan, however, is that there is a context. Whatever it was prior to the formation of the state of Israel in 1948, the Star of David is now the official symbol of an apartheid state. It's the focal point of that state's flag. It's up there on every one of its war machines. It's flaunted by the Israeli neo-Nazis deplored by Amos Oz. Is it any wonder that the victims of Israeli apartheid should consider it fair game?

Then there's the Holocaust. Legions of Zionist propagandists have been shamelessly playing the Holocaust card as a cover for Israeli war crimes for over 50 years now, many even claiming (falsely) that the ethnocratic 'Jewish' state of Israel was born of the Holocaust. Should it come as any surprise then that one man (among thousands) might be sufficiently fired up at the fact that his people, maybe even his relatives, are being butchered in Gaza to incorporate a reference, even a mocking one, to the Holocaust in his poster?

Only a Zionist, who has spent a lifetime muddying the difference between Jews and Zionists, would have the chutzpah to complain when a non-Jew fails, in her judgment, to differentiate between them.